Kings disregard democracy and do what they want. This is precisely what this elected official continues to attempt to do. No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings.
He's not attempting he's fucking doing it. Which to me signals deeper problems with our supposed "system of checks and balances" that we're taught since grade school. The system was specifically designed to prevent this, and yet it's happened. Whether Trump is impeached or imprisoned or whatever is secondary to plugging the holes he used to do this in the first place.
While I agree with you, there is also the fact that America chose Trump 2.0 - something we should try to understand and learn from. We, the credentialed elite (most people do not have a college degree), have failed to help our neighbors and fellow citizens.
The advent of the computer changed how automation impacted society. We (majority of HN audience) benefitted immensely, rising in wealth and social acclaim, while at the same time failing to create new tasks for regular people, who's jobs we replaced with technology.
Agreed. A No Executive Orders protest would be more clear and would be one I could get behind. It does seem like it would be good to limit the scope of Executive orders. Like, many were asking, how can he just close down the department of education with an exacutive order? Oh, it's because the department of education was formed by an excutive order of an earlier president in the first place.
The scope of Executive Orders is already limited by the Constitution. What additional limitations are you asking for?
In some cases Presidents have issued orders that exceeded their legal authority. The effects of those are eventually blocked by the judicial system, although that necessarily takes some time.
Well, a president should certainly be held accountable for any executive order that is overturned on constitutional grounds. Not only should the president have (and use) plenty of legal counsel to avoid this, but a president stepping beyond constitutional bounds is acting illegally which (a) none of us should and (b) ought not go unpunished.
Held accountable how? Like a fine or something? Maybe a strongly worded reprimand from the judiciary to be added to the president's formal HR employment record?
DHS literally telling federal court judges that they are going to continue extraditing someone in face of a court order not to, that they are not going to turn a plane around.
ICE refusing to make officers available to law enforcement for investigation of issues.
A lot more happening than "making executive orders", though kudos to Trump for trying to sign executive orders that even his own DOJ are not just illegal, but unconstitutional.
Do you think making things up and attributing them to other people is more or less constructive than replying to what they actually said? Do you usually get a great response when you go for cute X clapbacks, or... what?
I can't vote anyone out alone, so groups/ideas like No Kings seek to collect people around some general organizing principle. Involved people are more likely to vote and it's possible that you highlight the issues for people who aren't aware or energized enough to vote.
Plus, protests can influence other people in government, outside of elections.
Keep an eye on the Texas Senate race and what happens if Talarico wins. Paxton has granted himself the ability to investigate election fraud as the sitting AG.
Let's see if the will of the people is honored, or if the king steps in too.
There was an attempted self-coup last time he was voted out. I think it's pretty reasonable to be extra reactive to anti-democratic tendencies from him.
January 6, 2021 is well known. There are numerous examples leading up to, on the day, the years after, and even the first weeks of 2.0 - all interconnected - all anti-democratic.
"NoKings" is one identity for the resistance to autocratic tendencies and the backslide of democracy seen globally. We does not need to be so literal, step back to see the full picture.
Go rewatch the rally, there are plentiful anti-democratic statements.
Then watch the riot and explain to us how more than 100 officers were injured and why the people who did that deserved pardons, please, I am curious for the current justifications on the hard right
interesting justifications or absolvement... is this a reframing of the planted FBI conspiracy theory?
Are you saying those people who Trump pardoned, he did not call "his people" or "true patriots"? Are you objecting to the video evidence of the crimes committed by those same people on an individual basis?
Have you looked at any of these cases yourself (done your own research)?
Are you open to considering that anti-democratic statements were made by the people on stage at the rally?
You raised the issue of J6 and implied Trump's culpability for the actions of others. If you have proof he committed a criminal act, bring it. I am simply saying you did not present any in your prior statement.
A lot of illegal things happened that day. The rule of law applies. A lot of people are still in jail related to their activities on J6, patriots and otherwise.
Since I can predict what your next point will be: The intended scope of the J6 pardons was to be those wrongly prosecuted under the Biden DoJ's on-the-fly rewrite of 18 USC 1512 (which SCOTUS agreed was an improper interpretation) or those denied habeas corpus. Some mistakes were made and there's a handful of people that received pardons when they should still be in jail. That is not ok.
> Since I can predict what your next point will be
I didn't have to write this, but awaited your predictable response and you delivered exceptionally well. You are of the group of people caught up in divisive partisan politics. If someone is not on your team you cast them into your projected enemy identities. You forget there are millions and millions of people, more than either side, that can clearly see the abuses and law breaking by both sides.
Can you acknowledge any abuses of the law by Trump? Do you believe all leaders are doing this or do you make exception for your guy? Can you recognize that he started a new forever war for his own legacy and now we are all paying the price at the pump, the grocery store, and in our national reputation?
> You raised the issue of J6 and implied Trump's culpability
I did not imply it, I let you imply it because that is the predictable nature of people who make the arguments you have about January 6, 2021, even down to the J6 abbreviation, which is only used by a select group of people who say all the same things.
The rest of the world sees things clearly. The "J6" deniers cannot due to their biases. To acknowledge reality would be to acknowledge you have been lied to and manipulated by the people you revere. I understand this is emotionally difficult. The rest of us are here to support you when you are ready.
How about the part where he was pushing Pence to certify the "alternate electors" instead of the real ones? There's a reason some of the protesters were chanting "hang Mike Pence", and it's not because they disliked his haircut.
Returning votes to a state to check in with the state and see _IF_ they want to substitute a different slate of electors was a perfectly legal action at the time. They created a new act in 2022 to make that illegal called "Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022".
Are you implying some kind of collective punishment that Trump is somehow responsible for what everyone of a certain political alignment says?
Are you claiming that seven Republican state chairs decided to send "alternate electors" to DC, even though they lost all the relevant recounts and court cases, without at least Trump's approval? I can't prove you're wrong, but I don't buy it.
What I can say with certainty is that, when Trump pressured Pence to certify the alternate electors in spite of losing the recounts and court cases, that's not legal, and that's on Trump.
No. I'm saying until 2022, the legal and legitimate role of The Senate has always been to decide if questions or anomalies exist and re-query any or all of the several states.
I would point out, encouraging someone to perform a perfectly legal act itself is a perfectly legal act. You might not like it, but it's not illegal.
> legal and legitimate role of The Senate has always been to decide if questions or anomalies exist and re-query any or all of the several states
This is the theory of a few crackpot lawyers and is patently false. That is why Mike Pence did not go along with it, he listened to qualified lawyers and his son. This is more of the manipulation you have been under by the people you revere.
"No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings."
It would be great if the "other elected officials" part turns out to be true, but my in my experience I don't see that happening. Have there been any policy proposals out of No Kings that would create better oversight and accountability?
There are ideas for how to improve representation, which comes first. I do not get the feeling that current elected officials are interested in ceding their position, power, and prestige.
One of the good ideas are expanding ranked choice voting.
One of the bad ideas is justifying gerrymandering because the other side is doing it too.
Roughly only 10% of House seats are actually competitive. This is a problem that needs fixing.
The sheer number of participants implies that leadership can ignore those ideas at their peril. So if they don't know what the No Kings ideas are, they ought to look them up.
The No Kings protesters seem to want to disregard democracy because they don't like the current president. Repeatedly claimling the sky will fall given an election result seems to be undemocratic. Which certainly goes both ways, but right now it is the democrats who have fallen into this line of thinking. What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
I agree the far left says concerning things, as I do the hard right.
The difference to me today is I see intentional cruelty to our fellow humans by those currently in power. Especially from the likes of Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller.
Naming taxpayer-funded public facilities for a living politician has been historically unusual in America. LaGuardia Airport and Shushan Airport in New Orleans were both named for sitting politicians because they were strongmen or allied with strongmen.
Living ex-presidents were not fair game until the partisan late 1990s. It was still done primarily as a posthumous tribute. Naming taxpayer-funded facilities for a sitting president who hopes to find a way to run again was not done under Franklin Roosevelt and has always remained drastically outside of the Overton Window. While in office, Trump has now directed attention to making the following public items promote his personal brand, name, image or likeness:
US Passports, US entry visas, US Naval class of vessels, US Institute of Peace federal building, National Park entry passes, and currency struck by the US Mint;
Moreover, presidential staff have confirmed that the president has asked for New York Penn Station to be renamed for himself before he would agree to release congressionally approved federal funds for its improvement. He also explored having Washington Dulles International Airport renamed for him; since then, his supporters have renamed Palm Beach International Airport (IATA PBI) for him and changed the IATA designation to DJT.
The president recently diverted over $22MM from Homeland Security and Border Protection to pay for television commercials featuring himself talking about causes dear to himself. I have not tracked whether this spending went to all major broadcast networks or was directed to be spent at networks that the president considered deserved the tax money. The third commercial "was virtually identical to an ad for Trump's Republican reelection campaign in 2024 and showed him walking down a hallway as his voice can be heard warning of a 'final battle' against 'globalists' and 'warmongers'." The president has reportedly agreed not to continue spending government money on this series but refuses to reimburse taxpayers the $22MM.
Naming stuff after himself is certainly a good demonstration of his narcissistic tendencies and is tactless. I do think the criticism over this is fair but I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities given it doesn’t materially affect anyone. We should probably have limits, and a good demonstration of that is the failure to rename the Kennedy Center.
I do agree that the ads should be criticized, but there is precedent for previous presidents having done something similar, not that it makes it above scrutiny but rather not so bad.
> I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities
The problem many Americans have is that these are the top priorities of the president. Even the Iran war was more about him and his legacy, to "be the guy" who ended it, not understanding Iran's ability to inflict damage on allies and close the straight, because Trump removed many of the people who have been analyzing this for decades. Perhaps there were good reasons prior presidents have not decided to do this.
Then he turns around and does deals with Putin while blaming Zelensky for diesel prices... it's all so shameless, it should be shameful.
If you listen to oval office or state room events in full, you will hear him forget what he is talking about and go to his standard ballroom, arches, name on this or that. He's more focused on himself than anyone else.
Iran was going through a humanitarian crisis after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilians, not to mention the nearly 50 years of oppression and suffering that the IRGC has inflicted. The approach of appeasement was disastrous and gave the Iranian regime a lot of money.
So you want constant war in Ukraine? What did Obama do when Russia took Crimea? What did Biden do during the Russia-Ukraine war that improved the situation?
He’s a narcissist, but so are all of them but Trump is probably more tactless about it than most.
He went to war for his legacy and miscalculated badly, because the people who understand the region and the IRGC were fired or pushed out. He was sending Witkoff and Kushner (real estate guys) to negotiate nuclear topics, alone, without experts in nuclear science or Iran / IRGC.
My expectation is they do to Trump what they did to Carter.
We can care about many things at the same time. We also care about the humanitarian crisis created by Elon Musk from dismantling USAID and RFK Jr. from running HHS based on medical misinformation.
I have enjoyed our many threads we have had. I appreciate you keeping this civil. Feel free to have the last word, I do enjoy the push back and your perspective.
All true, and all both alarming and disgusting... with one nit.
In 1926, coinage was struck with the image of the sitting president, in honor of the nation's 150th anniversary. It turns out that Trump on coins for the 250th anniversary has precedent.
The rest of it... yeah. Appalling, especially when you put it all together like that.
I don't think any other president promoted anything like January 6, and doesn't recognize an election of a president to this day - undermining democracy, the same democratic system that elected him twice.
Just that alone is enough I think.
But you can also see his disgust to western democracies, and his fascination with autocracies, the vast majority of them are extremely incompetent - thank God for that at least.
There was Russian interference, that's well reported and public.
And why are you bringing a "what about" argument for a very clear statement in reply to your comment - why aren't you acknowledging the reply, and trying to bring other subject that has nothing to do with what I said?
Would you be referring to the Mueller Report and the bipartisan SIC Report that both found copious amounts of interaction and communication between Russia and the Trump administration and campaign staff?
Or would you be referring to the MI6 and Mossad reports that confirmed these findings of Russian involvement in Trump's first election and first term?
>Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity, and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It ... has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.
What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
You're joking right? In just the past 48 hours he attempted to remove over 20,000 people from the voter rolls. A preliminary check of the data revealed that more than half of these people were born in the U.S. and thus were automatically entitled to vote.
Last week he attempted to denaturalize a sitting U.S. legislator based on supposed irregularities in her immigration paperwork from when she was a child...even though the paperwork had been reviewed without issue by the federal government when it was first submitted and again to confirm her eligibility for office at the start of her first term (which began during Trump's first term).
He has openly mused about using the Secret Service to assassinate people he doesn't like. For the past 2 years, he has been threatening to jail and murder his opponents, and ordered his DOJ to prosecute his opponents for made-up crimes.
A variety of sources, some more frequently than others depending on current events and interests and some subscriptions have lapsed (the new york times, npr, foxnews, the wall street journal, national review, al jazeera, the guardian, the telegraph). I would recommend you and others do the same.
Ilhan Omar’s alleged corruption and immigration fraud and the rampant fraud in Minnesota are good examples where the left leaning media has ignored but others have not.
The executive (1/3rd of the government) being capricious with the press is _undoubtedly_ embarrassing and unamerican, but is so far away from the behavior of a true monarch that the name "no kings" is still farcical at best.
That's one example, there are daily reminders to why "NoKings" has staying power as a movement, compared to the Indivisible brand. I suggest watching a full segment from the oval office, listen to the things that preoccupy his mind.
I do agree there is a ton of hyperbolics in NoKings / Indivisible / the left. I work within these organizations, enduring it, to temper their messages and opinions. Minds are moved in real life while biases are reinforced online. It's hard to forget there is another human with different experiences when you sit face to face.
Oh my parents and their partners go to all the no kings rallies. I can see the size of the movement dwindling over time. I'm very happy someone is attempting to temper though, because, as I've said for a decade now, the hyperbolics drive way more support for your opponents than they do for your cause.
The way out starts with community. I cannot understate how much getting involved has positively impacted my life. We have to interact with those different from us if we are to find collaboration and compromise.
Here are some things Obama did that were unprecedented or very concerning regarding the press:
* Obama extensively used the Espionage Act to uncover government sources used by the press and also against the press directly
* Obama secretly subpoenaed the phone calls of AP reporters
* Obama didn't allow or severely restricted photojournalists
I don't think that it is good to ban the media from the White House, and I do think the much of the criticism is fair, but to then claim that this is undemocratic is wrong.
Both parties, the oligarchy, are the problem. Power continues to concentrate in the President, Congress does nothing. SCOTUS polls marginally better, the Press has ceased fulfilling their role. Wealth inequality reached an all time high in America. We The People are furious for varied and valid reasons.
I do think there's a problem and certainly agree with the general sentiment. I also do think we probably have it better than most other countries. So, perhaps we can deal with the oligarchy and fraud within our system. I do think that is what led many to vote for Trump, in that they feel failed by both parties and Trump was an outsider, similar to Bernie's ascendance.
I agree, I have not heard it put better than The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. It goes beyond party politics to the failures of Liberal Democracy stemming from its own success.
Exactly. Even the ‘most secret’ ones need customers and publish promo videos to show off their capabilities (like ‘Swiss Fort Knox’ or Tencent’s seven star data center (apparently it can withstand nukes)). Edit: swiss fort knox media coverage boasts about secret location and armed security etc, but you can find it in 1 min on google maps)
The existing financial system which provides protection to consumers. Crypto doesn’t solve the problem the general public assumes it does and hype has inflated its value dramatically.
What regulations would help with this? companies that actually host the models themselves can be regulated but open models can e abliterated or otherwise modified to stop them from refusing tasks. I'd be very wary of any regulations that prevent people from hosting or making their own models and weights.
There’s always been lottery tickets. If this causes you to lose sleep you need to take a step back and reconsider some things. Either learn to cope or become more risk tolerant. I mean this in the most genuine and whole hearted way possible as an engineer on the second half of a career.
Well that would depend on your interest rate, presumably. Especially since interest is tax deductible in some places.
If you _do_ break up, this also makes it harder for one person to keep the house, which might be bad if there's kids in a local school, etc. If you have 100k in equity it's easier to buy out your ex than if you have 1 million in equity.
Mathematically, yes, it depends on the interest rate. Over the reality of how humans work is people who pay their house off early are the type of people who tend to make other good financial decisions. And so paying off your house early is good advice even though it seems like it shouldn't be by any mathematical means. If you are the exception that actually has the discipline to invest in things that are better than a house Again, assuming common interest rates and other investments available - you are better off, but the reality is that type of person doesn't exist.
Yes, but I haven't found an exception. Either people are risk adverse and so they prioritized paying off the low interest rate loans; or they don't apply it to their own life.
Fwiw I have an automatic transfer of 25% of my take home in to IBKR every month… I actually mostly regret being too financially conservative in the past. Should never have sold off bitcoin to pay student loans…
What is the issue with the bank holding the title? Sure, you lose the house if you can't make the payments to the bank, but you also lose the house if you can't make the tax payments to the government. In both situations (with or without a mortgage), you never truly own it.
In general your tax payment is much lower than your house payment, and so if you can pay the house off, you will have or should have no problem paying the taxes. Watch the local politics because everyone saw this does fail but it is pretty rare overall. Meanwhile people do lose their job and the payment portion of the house is a lot of money and so you can lose your job just because bad luck and in turn you lost your house.
Or to put it a different way, if my house was paid for, it would hurt, but I could make all ends meet just working fast food jobs. It wouldn't be an easy life, I'd end up walking a few miles to the nearest fast food place because I couldn't afford a car, but I could at least keep my house.
> knowing that the bank still holds the title to your house.
While the bank holds the title on a financed car, they don't actually hold title on your house. They will have a recorded lien, of course. But you hold the title, which should help you sleep ;p.
That's why a house is foreclosed, and a car is repossessed. Repo is lender calls the tow peeps and they pick up your car; foreclosure requires notice and often court and plenty of bureaucracy.
Neither option is fun, of course.
On topic, I was paying a little extra on my mortgage (mostly as I rate adjusted down, I would tend to keep paying the old payment), but when savings interest is more than mortgage interest, it was just as easy to sleep with a savings balance equal to the mortgage balacne as with no mortgage.
It’s quicker to start with enforcement of existing laws. In parallel, we can work on regulation. There always will be first to market rebels and laws are meant to be enforced to ensure safety of people.
